In relationships, people frequently have high expectations that their partners would share their attitudes, values, perceptions, and behaviours. We are aware that unless your partner is motivated to do so, you will not be able to modify their attitudes or habits. Even less likely are your efforts to alter their fundamental gender traits. Therefore, it's crucial to educate oneself on the fundamental differences between men and women that exist between them and recognise that those disparities exist, are true, and won't go away. In this way, you might discover how to use your differences to strengthen your bond rather than fray it.
CONFLICTS WHICH ARISE DUE TO BASIC DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN:
- The most frequent complaint men have about women: Women are always trying to change them.
- The most frequent complaint women have about men: Men don’t listen.
- Women want empathy, yet men usually offer solutions.
- When a woman tries to change or improve or correct or give advice to a man, men hear that they are being told that they aren’t competent or don’t know how to do something or that they can’t do something on their own.
- Men often feel responsible or to blame for women’s problems.
- Men always assume women want advice and solutions to problems, that that is the best way to be helpful and to show love; women often just want someone to sincerely listen to them.
- Housework: men avoid it, try to get others to do it at all costs, feel demeaned by doing it. For women, cleanliness of the house is a manifestation of a warm, homey nest. Men and women have different thresholds for cleanliness and dirt.
- Men often try to change a woman’s mood when she is upset by offering solutions to her problems, which she interprets as discounting and invalidating her feelings.
- Women try to change men’s behavior by offering unsolicited advice and criticism and becoming a home-improvement committee.
HOW TO WORK WITH THESE DIFFERENCES:
- When women are upset, it is not the time to offer solutions, though that may be appropriate at a future time when she is calmed down.
- A man appreciates advice and criticism when it is requested. Men want to make improvements when they feel they are being approached as a solution to a problem rather than as the problem itself.
- Men have great needs for status and independence (emphasis on separate and different); women have needs for intimacy and connection (emphasis on close and same).
- Women need to receive caring, understanding, respect, devotion, validation, and reassurance.
- Women are motivated when they feel special or cherished.
- Men need to receive trust, acceptance, appreciation, admiration, approval, encouragement.
- Men are motivated when they feel needed.
- A man’s deepest fear is that he is not good enough or not competent enough, though he may never express this